Tom Johnson is Redundant #nlpoli

Pity Tom Johnson.

The St. John’s lawyer landed a steady source of billable hours when the provincial Conservatives made him the consumer advocate at the public utilities board.

Tom has been doing a fine job of advocating for consumers, even if his version puts an interesting twist on what he is advocating for consumers to do.

Take last year, for example.  Johnson advocated during the Muskrat Falls hearings.  He advocated  for the Muskrat Falls project.  That means, in effect, that consumers will be forced to pay for the entire Muskrat Falls project in their electricity bills, plus profit for the companies involved. 

Well done, Tom.  Consumers will be thanking you in the future.

In the meantime, though, Tom is not resting on his laurels.  This time, Tom is hard at it advocating during an application by Newfoundland Power for its return on equity. 

Bond Year Eight #nlpoli

On SRBP’s eighth anniversary, a sampler of some January commentaries:

• A year of Bonding (January 2006)
• Whistleblower Protection Legislation (January 2009)
• Pater Knows Best  (January 2011)
• Undisclosed Risk:  financing the Lower Churchill (January 2011)

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Bravery and Democracy #nlpoli

“It is easy to be an armchair critic, tweeted natural resources minister Jerome Kennedy before Christmas, “but It takes real courage to stand for election.”

In another context, John Steele offered this opinion about your humble e-scribbler.:

“One thing that I respect about Ed is, he’s got balls enough to put his name to stuff. He’s not anonymous, so I respect that.”

The word “democracy” derives from the Greek words for people and power.  Democracy is a form of government in which everyone may participate equally and fully in making decisions that will affect them.
 

Some books for the New Year #nlpoli

Shannon Ryan’s A history of Newfoundland in the North Atlantic to 1818 is an engaging, accessible account of the English in Newfoundland from the earliest arrival through to the end of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.

The publisher’s blurb:

The waters off Newfoundland, in the North Atlantic, held the world’s most abundant supply of codfish, which, when discovered, was in great demand. Unlike the fur trade—the other major early commercial activity in what is now mainland Canada—the production of codfish did not require year-round residence. It did, however, require numerous men, young and old, for the fishing season, which ran from spring to early fall.

This successful English-Newfoundland migratory fishery evolved into an exclusively shore-based, but still migratory, fishery that led to the formation of a formal colony by 1818. Shannon Ryan offers this general history as an introduction to early Newfoundland. The economy and social, military, and political issues are dealt with in a straightforward narrative that will appeal to general readers as well as students of Newfoundland and Labrador history.

And if that whets your appetite, you can also hunt down a copy of Jerry Bannister’s The rule of the Admirals:  law, custom, and naval government in Newfoundland, 1699-1832.

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The Perpetual Talking Point Disaster #nlpoli

Premier Kathy Dunderdale’s year-end talking points for 2012 were pretty grim. 

As she told CBC’s David Cochrane, the provincial government is facing an enormous deficit.  The deficit is the result not of government spending but of the up-and-down nature of the commodities on which government revenues depend. 

The result is that government will have to raise taxes or cut jobs or some combination of both in order to cope with the deficit next year.

This should sound awfully familiar to people.

Talking Point Politics #nlpoli

The Telegram’s Saturday front page story on Tory efforts to manipulate online polls and comments garnered two equal and opposite reactions over the weekend in that political echo chamber called Twitter.  [The story isn’t free.  it’s in the online subscriber edition]

Some people got into a lather over it.

Some other people tried to blow it off as something we’ve known all along, something everyone does everywhere, and no big thing.

Equal and opposite, if you will, but the big issue here is in the middle of these two opinion poles.

Creating a Baby Boom. Not. #nlpoli

Flip over to the Occupy NL blog and you’ll see a critique of some recent SRBP posts on the provincial government’s bonus cash for live babies program.

Let’s summarise the critique and then go from there.  While this summary will get you through this post, to be fair and to make sure that nothing gets missed, go read the full post with all the charts included at Occupy NL.

The author takes issue with the SRBP approach in the initial post in the December series, which looked at the total number of births. He contends that we should look at “the average number of live births a woman can expect in her lifetime based on age-specific fertility rates in a given year.  Secondly, his analysis doesn't acknowledge that declining birth rates is a trend nation-wide and that provincial rates should be compared to what is happening in other provinces.”

Middle Earth Safety Briefing

Air New Zealand capitalizes on Peter Jackson and his love of Tolkien:

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Attitudes to Guns #nlpoli

Her pistol is concealable with any outfit choice.

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Top 10 Posts for 2012 #2012

Here they are, folks, the 10 most-read posts of 2012 at SRBP.

1. When will she quit?  Now that Muskrat Falls is sanctioned, how long will it be before Kathy Dunderdale resigns?
2. Labrador mining and Muskrat Falls  JM’s commentary on the relationship between Muskrat Falls and mining projects in Labrador.
3. S-92 Incident – March 2012  CNLOPB reported an incident offshore with a Cougar S-92.  SRBP pointed out what the incident was about.  Three days later, Cougar decided to replace the gearboxes.
4. Disappeared Deputy Hired in 2011 as deputy minister of natural resources, Diana Dalton vanished in 2012 without a mention from the provincial government.  What happened to her? 
5. Up her nose, sideways  Kathy Dunderdale doesn’t like someone named JM who has been cutting the guts out of Muskrat Falls.
6. Brian Peckford’s memoir now on sale
7. Gil  Bennett won’t re-tweet this post  The water management agreement controversy
8. Tone, standards and political suicide Since 2003, the provincial Conservatives have operated an American style of attack politics.  “If the Tories don’t change the tone, if they keep the same low standards for politics that [Paul] Lane keeps displaying, then they can expect to keep suffering the death by a thousand and one self-inflicted cuts.”
9. 10 reasons to oppose Muskrat Falls  Simon Lono tweeted ‘em.  SRBP reprinted ‘em.  Readers loved ‘em.
10. Sex and the cabinet  “In Kathy Dunderdale’s cabinet, men run all the big economic portfolios while women run the big social policy portfolios.”

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Mars Attacks!

Add this one to the New Year’s wish list:  coming in 2013 from Moebius.

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Fertility Rates: a different perspective #nlpoli

Via Occupy Newfoundland and Labrador,  a different take on the success of the bootie call from the one presented in this corner recently.

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If you’re serious about ideas… #nlpoli

then get serious about blogging.

From the Harvard Business Review:

Writing is still the clearest and most definitive medium for demonstrating expertise on the web. But as thought leaders like Gary Vaynerchuk have shown with video blogging and fellow HBR blogger Mitch Joel with podcasting (i.e., audio blogging), as long as your content is rich and thoughtful, you can still build up a massive following and reputation regardless of your channel. In an information-hungry world, there will always be a need for expert content. And there will always be more readers and "retweeters" than there will be creators.

If you want to have an impact, you might as well be the one setting the agenda by blogging your ideas.

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Not with a bang, but a whimper #nlpoli

The longest filibuster in Newfoundland and Labrador legislative history ended quietly Saturday morning.

This was the second filibuster this year and the  Telegram’s legislative reported posed a simple question via Twitter before the House closed.

What does it say about current Newfoundland and Labrador political culture that we’ve had two such filibusters in a single year?

Normally a filibuster is an opposition tactic to hold up a government proposal the opposition doesn’t like.  That was the case with the Bill 29 filibuster in the spring.

As it turns out, the Muskrat Falls filibuster was different things for different parties.

JM 6 - Two Variants of the Interconnected Option

Volume 6 - 2 Variants

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The Teens and 40s #nlpoli

As the last instalment in our survey of birth rates, let’s take a look at the group 15 to 19 and the other end of the scale for statistics, women aged 40-44 at the time of the child’s birth.

The blue line is the number of births to mothers between ages 15 and 19.  From 810 births in 1991 down to 321 in 2010.  Note, though that the low point on the blue line is 2005 at 254.  Since then the number of births to mothers between 15 and 19 has risen steadily.  The rate is lower, though:  one in 32 in 1991 compared to one in 46 in 2010.

The numbers of babies born to women between 40 and 45 remains relatively very low.  Still, it has doubled in the past two decades from the 52 births in 1991 to the 100 that occurred in 2010.

The red line is the births for mothers aged 35 to 39.  It’s there for comparison.  In 1991, women in their late 30s gave birth to 387 babies.  That is just less than half the number of children born to mothers 19 and under.  Two decades later the teenagers are not having as many babies and the older women are having more.  Notice, however, that the 2010 moms  in the 35 to 39 category still were not having as many babies as the teenagers 20 years earlier.

The West Wing: the Stackhouse Filibuster #nlpoli

 

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The Dam Filibuster - Mr. Smith goes to Washington #nlpoli

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The 30-Something Birth Rates #nlpoli

[Note: This is a revised version of the original post.  The earlier one  was based on the wrong tables]

The 2007 provincial government bounty on live births appears to have had little impact on trends in birth rates among the 20-somethings in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The same is true for the 30-somethings.

The 20-Something Birth Rates #nlpoli

As we told you a couple of weeks ago, it doesn’t look like the provincial government’s policy of paying cash for live births produced any improvement in the birthrate in the province except for the year they announced the bonus cash.

When you look at the birth rate by age of mother some other interesting things appear.

Let’s start with the 20-somethings.  Note:  this is a revised version of the post.  The original post was based on the wrong Statistics Canada tables.